Why can’t the British pop industry launch new acts that last?

It’s all been happening in the pop world since I was last here. David Bowie released a new song, arguably his best in several decades. Wilko Johnson announced that he had terminal cancer, and a lot of men in their fifties wept for their own lost youth. HMV went belly up, and I ripped my £5 HMV voucher into shreds, hours before they decided they would honour the damn things after all. Is it my imagination, or have prices for CDs risen ever so slightly on Amazon these past few weeks? For them, I suppose, the job is done, and monopolistic practices can now creep in and grab hold of the market by the throat.

A music lawyer I know is very pessimistic about the future of recorded music, not least because if there is no more money to be made, she won’t be making any either. She thinks that young people won’t start bands any more, that music will simply contract for a while. I’m not so sure. Making huge piles of cash is only one reason young people become musicians. Having sex with other young people is an important one, and avoiding proper work is another. It will take more than harsh economic circumstances to negate the squalid glamour of the musician’s sordid existence. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the harsh economic circumstances didn’t actually encourage more young people to start bands. It’s not as though they have anything else to do.

There is little doubt, though, that the music business could do with a kick up the arse. My ten-year-old has been lobbying fiercely for the purchase of Now 83, the latest CD in the long-running series that collects recent chart-bothering singles.